Watch a 19-Year-Old Carrie Fisher’s First Audition for Star Wars
The late actress was just a teen when she filmed her first screen test with Harrison Ford.
It’s been a year since Carrie Fisher‘s untimely death at just 60 years old, but the actress has hardly been forgotten—and not just by her daughter Billie Lourd, who’s been making tributes to her late mom both on the red carpet and on Instagram recently. With Star Wars: The Last Jedi now in theaters—which Fisher both appears in and contributed some jokes to before her death—her presence has been on everyone’s minds. It’s even caused Fisher’s first-ever Star Wars audition tape to resurface on the internet (even though it was in fact first posted in 2006).
Fisher’s original screen test dates back to 1977, when she was just 19, and also stars one Harrison Ford, who was then in his early thirties. (And with whom she’d later have a brief affair while filming, even though he was married at the time.) The black-and-white video begins with a scene of Fisher urging Ford’s Han Solo to action, emphatically telling him that “hiding is useless now” because the “little droid” he’s so unconcerned about could in fact lead to their—and many other’s—destruction. From there comes another take of the scene, which Fisher again begins with a sigh, before looking into the camera and saying her name and age, as instructed by someone off-screen.
Of course, things weren’t exactly easy from there: as Variety points out, Fisher has said she was asked to lose 10 pounds before she could have the role of Princess Leia—which became 35 pounds when it came time for 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, leading Fisher to say that the crew only wanted to hire “only about three quarters” of her.
“They might as well say get younger, because that’s how easy it is,” Fisher said, the year before her untimely death—a comment we can now more vividly picture her making with one of the exasperated sighs she’d apparently been making since she was a teen.
Celebrating Carrie Fisher’s Final Appearance as Princess Leia
Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, 1983. Image courtesy of ©20th Century-Fox Film Corp. / Everett Collection.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Director Rian Johnson and Carrie Fisher, on set, 2017. Photo by David James/ © Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Lucasfilm Ltd. /Image courtesy of Everett Collection.
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, Carrie Fisher, 1980, Image courtesy of ©Lucasfilms / Everett Collection.
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, Carrie Fisher and a medical droid, 1980. Image courtesy of ©Lucasfilm Ltd. / Everett Collection.
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, Billy Dee Williams, Chewbacca, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford, 1980. Image courtesy of Everett Collection. =
Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, C-3PO and Carrie Fisher, 1983. Image courtesy of Everett Collection.
Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, Carrie Fisher, 1983. Image courtesy of Everett Collection.
Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, 1977. Photo courtesy of Everett Collection.
Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, Carrie Fisher, 1983
Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, 1983. Image courtesy of ©Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. / Everett Collection
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, 1980. Image courtesy of ©20th Century Fox/Everett Collection.
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Harrison Ford, 1980. Image courtesy of Everett Collection.
Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, Carrie Fisher, 1977. Image courtesy of Lucas Films/Courtesy Everett Collection.
Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega & Carrie Fisher promoting “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” on Jimmy Kimmel Live, November 23, 2016. Image courtesy of Randy Holmes/ABC via Getty Images.
Carrie Fisher and her daughter Billie Lourd attend the Premiere of Walt Disney Pictures and Lucasfilm’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” on December 14, 2015 in Hollywood, California. Image courtesy of Todd Williamson/Getty Images.
Revisit Some of Carrie Fisher’s Best Moments as Princess Leia:
